Comment 0 for bug 1829409

Hi!

I've found, quite surprised, that xfsdump doesn't allow dump level numbers outside of the range [0-9]. Given that even storing that number requires a full byte (8 bits), it boggles the mind why more numbers aren't supported. The usefulness of supporting more numbers (24? even 255...) is for taking hourly delta snapshots of live filesystems using xfsdump as a backup measure.

With a simple script one can write a backup that takes a full dump (level 0) of the filesystem for the first backup of a given date, and all other backups during that day are incrementals (levels are > 0 ... i.e. the hour of the day the backup is taken). However, given that the tool only supports [0-9] as the backup level, this seems like an arbitrary limitation.

Is there a real, technical limitation that this level is adhering to?

Cheers!